I was repelled by the sleazy reality of the totalitarian countries: politicians were shameless. There were corruption, pollution, shoddy goods, long lines, and suicide everywhere, but the leaders kept boasting about their great achievements and bright tomorrows. I saw all this and tried to show it in my pictures as simply and straightforwardly as I could. All I wanted to do was record how all these poor people adapted to lies and suffering, how they got used to it, how, in fact they were bound to miss it when it was over.

When my father took my picture in 1932 after my accident, I knew that a battlefield of suffering was in my eyes. From then on, I started looking straight at the lens, unflinching, unsmiling, determined to show that I was a good fighter to the end. (On her father Guillermo Kahlo, 1871-1941, a photographer)

When I’m on the red carpet, I’m prepared for [the attention.] But the worst thing is on planes, when you’re asleep and you’re woken up by a camera flashing. That’s a little bit much. But what do you do? It’s a part of [being famous]. Unfortunately.

Annette Kuhn[Writer and theorist, lives in Lancaster, England.]

A photograph can certainly throw you off the scent. You will get nowhere, for instance, by taking a magnifying glass to it to get a closer look: you will see only patches of light and dark, an unreadable mesh of grains. The image yields nothing to that sort of scrutiny; it simply disappears. In order to show what it is evidence of, a photograph must always point you away from itself.

...my father gave me the land with the house behind the main prison. And that’s where I opened my studio. It's a place where no one wanted to live because of the “spirits” that threw stones in the night. Even today if you sleep in that house and you turn off the light a great gleaming white horse spirit might appear.